


Dangerous Games

by Silex



Category: Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Ignores Prototype 2, Infected Characters, Shapeshifting, Tentacles, Xeno, Xenophilia, technically not incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-07 01:31:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18400391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Dana thinks she knows what she wants. Alex knows better, but still Dana keeps trying.





	Dangerous Games

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Masu_Trout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/gifts).



> Hello small fandom friend! Thank you so much for asking for this, getting to meet another person in this small, odd fandom is so awesome. Being able to write this for you pretty much made this exchange for me.

Eyes half closed, Alex watched Dana.

She’d just gotten out of the shower and was searching through the apartment for something clean to wear.

Her search had brought her into the living room where he was currently sitting, pretending to sleep.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

Closing his eyes he listened to her approach.

She knew that he wasn’t asleep, that he didn’t sleep.

He heard her stop, watching him.

Keeping his eyes closed he let her walk past, and then opened them just enough to watch.

She bent down to pick something up, letting the towel slip down, and then turned around.

Adjusting the towel, opening it to leave herself completely exposed for just a second, before rewrapping it beneath her breasts, she stood and watched him.

Her disappointed sigh wasn’t something that he imagined. She’d wanted him to notice, to say something.

It was a dangerous game she was playing.

Another sigh and she left the living room.

He knew exactly what she wanted, even if he suspected that she didn’t.

It was too risky, something that she was smart enough to know, yet she continued to play the game.

A week ago she’d accused him pointblank of not being her brother, that he was too nice, too concerned, too deferential. He’d done the only thing he could, admitted everything to her, confirming her worst suspicions.

But even before that she’d been playing the game.

She’d prepared meals for him that he couldn’t eat, watched as he didn’t and tried to engage him in conversation. Asking him questions that someone didn’t ask their brother. She wasn’t getting reacquainted with him, she was trying to catch him in a lie.

Or getting to know a stranger.

Pointed questions about Karen Parker, his job, what he’d been doing since he’d vanished, which almost made sense.

But then she’d ask questions about what he liked, what he was going to do when things were all over. Testing maybe, or trying to gauge what he was.

Because there were questions about that too.

The virus, she’d wanted to know, what had it done to him?

He’d demurred.

She’d insisted, wanting to see.

There were videos, she explained, she’d found during her research, and she wanted to know if they were real.

He shrugged, not wanting to know which videos, what she’d seen him do. It wouldn’t help sop Gentech or Blackwatch so it didn’t matter.

There’d been a point when she’d been afraid of him, but they were somehow past that now.

Somehow.

She stomped back into the room, loud enough that he supposed it was intended to wake him up.

He made a show of yawning, turning to face away from her when she sat down next to him, hoping that she’d get the hint.

She didn’t.

Instead she inched closer so that she was pressed against him.

She had to know better.

“Alex?” she leaned against him, put a hand on his thigh.

There was no ignoring that.

“What?” he demanded, not managing the appropriate level of anger for someone who’d just been woken up.

She did a worse job of pretending than he had, not bothering to flinch away or look ashamed at what she was doing, “What are you really?”

What, not who.

He frowned, shook his head, “Why?”

Meaning why now, why not let the subject drop and go back to pretending?

It was safer that way.

It wasn’t that he liked being Alex Mercer now that he knew what the man whose face he wore had done. An argument could still be made that he was a victim of circumstance, but Alex Mercer certainly hadn’t been.

“The files I’ve gotten from Blackwatch, they say that you shapeshift, can be anyone, that you’re not really human,” she shrugged helplessly, “So why are you, well, you?”

The easy answer was because that Alex Mercer was the first, who he’d thought he was for the longest time, but there was more to it than that and Dana knew it. He should have said something at the start, before it had come to this.

She knew exactly why, she just wanted to hear him say it so that she could take her game to the next stage.

Shaking his head he looked away.

“Really,” she turned, moving so that she was straddling him, “I want to know why.”

He looked up at her.

She wasn’t wearing a bra and he could see the shape of her nipples through her shirt.

Did she really think that meant anything to him when it was the closeness, the contact that mattered?

He wanted to grab her, force her to the floor and do things to her that weren’t at all what she imagined. He knew what she expected though, she was human after all and thought of things in those terms and he had the memories of enough men and women to have a fairly good idea. Unfortunately that had no bearing on the thoughts that entered his mind, at least not the ones that were distinctly him rather than stolen memories.

“Why?” She insisted.

If they were through pretending then maybe it was for the best, “Do you want me to be someone else?”

She looked at him blankly, apparently never having considered the idea.

She rocked in place, seeing what response she might get.

He also wondered how she might respond, so he allowed his form to loose cohesion, red and black tendrils rising up as his body reshaped itself.

To her credit Dana didn’t flinch away, in fact he was fairly sure that she seemed to smile at the way the tendrils slid against her, perhaps thinking that it was the reaction she’d been seeking.

Focusing on one of the countless victims he’d consumed the approximation of bone and muscle shifted, tendrils slowly settling back into place so that Dana sat straddling a Blackwatch soldier in full combat gear.

She recoiled in fear, fell off the couch and backed away from him.

“Don’t do that! Don’t fucking do that!” She shouted and ran from the room.

Alex had assumed that would be the end of the game.

It wasn’t.

Her persistence caught him by surprise. Only three days after his frightening her they were having a conversation late at night, one that took them pacing, back and forth through the apartment. Dana did it because she assumed that he got restless because of the way he would leave her for long stretches of time and refuse to tell her what he’d been doing when he returned. It was for her own safety that he didn’t talk, and to hide how inhuman he was. Even if she knew he wasn’t really her brother, likely the root of the whole problem, she didn’t need to know what he was.

So they paced as they talked, going from room to room, making no real progress in any of the matters discussed. It didn’t matter that he would have been equally content to sit motionless and listen to the whole conversation, Dana believed it helped so he went along with it.

She was more caught on the nebulous idea of stopping Blackwatch than he was. The organization was corrupt, rotten to the core, but given what it worked with, what it fought against, that was understandable, forgivable even because the alternative to their not being there for the next outbreak was worse.

True the only way for Dana to be safe would be to get rid of them, but then who would be going after the runners that were bound to follow what had happened? Alex was sure he’d be fine, but what about Dana? He’d spent months laying low with her, hiding, letting them believe him to be dead and waiting for the quarantine to be lifted and it was working.

Blackwatch wasn’t looking for him anymore.

But was anyone looking for Dana?

Unlike him there was only so much she could do to disguise who she was, one slipup and it would be over for her.

Or the start of a long, arduous chase.

They argued about where to go, what to do, the best way to escape Manhattan.

Their plans were too different. Dana’s ideas were noble, stop a corrupt government, bring to light the horrors of Blackwatch. He just wanted to slip away and vanish because the things Dana wanted to expose hit too close to home for him. Even if he wasn’t really Alex Mercer there was some attachment to the name, the face, that he didn’t want Dana delving too deeply into what her brother had done. Or maybe she already had and this game she was playing was her attempt at burying him and all he’d done.

At the root of it all he wanted to protect her, from Blackwatch, from what her brother had done, from himself.

Their conversation went in circles as they did and tonight the constant motion only made things worse. Dana would brush past him, reach out to touch him to emphasize some point whether it was necessary or not. The contact made him want to reach out, grab her back and do things to her that he couldn’t properly articulate.

Usually contact with him ended messily.

Their pacing took them into the bedroom where, without warning, Dana announced that she was tired and wanted to go to sleep.

Then she stripped while he was standing there, her actions sudden enough that it took him far too long to process why she was doing what she was doing.

His mistake was that he watched. Even if he wasn’t human, wasn’t interested in Dana the way she was interested in him, he understood enough to appreciate that she was an attractive young woman.

“You like what you see?” She asked with a smile, cupping her hands beneath her breasts as though offering herself to him.

He stayed where he was, watching, trying to decide if there was a correct response.

Her smile never faltering, Dana walked over to him, took his hand in hers and placed it on her chest.

The feeling of skin to skin contact wasn’t strange to him, the feeling of someone’s heartbeat, the blood flowing through their veins, expect it usually ended with a spray of warmth as that blood was shed, the stilling of that frantic heartbeat as they fought and struggled and died by his claws.

There was enough of him that was human that he enjoyed the feel of her against him, wanted more, but he knew himself well enough to know that it wouldn’t stop at that. The Blacklight virus wouldn’t let it stop at that.

He wasn’t some mindless monster, but there were instincts and he couldn’t trust himself.

“Please,” she whispered, “I know what you can do, you don’t have to be…”

She shrugged helplessly.

What didn’t he have to be?

Alex Mercer?

Careful?

“You mean too much to me,” he sighed, pulling his hand away.

She tried to hold on.

When he pulled his hand away from her and turned around she grabbed his jacket and clung to him with all her might.

Fragile as she was he couldn’t shove her away. She was only human after all and he didn’t want to hurt her. All he could do was keep walking, dragging her across the apartment as she refused to let go.

“Why?” She begged.

It wasn’t the first time he’d heard that plea, just not in this context.

When it had been someone he’d sought begging for their life, wanting to know why them, he’d been unmoved, but Dana’s asking for an explanation moved him in a way that frightened him.

He pretended to be human for her sake, but he didn’t like feeling that human. He was at peace with what he was and what he wasn’t, it was Dana who didn’t understand.

He didn’t want to hurt her, but by not giving her what she wanted he hurt her none the less.

“I’m too dangerous,” he snapped, tired of the game and how conflicted it left him feeling, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I trust you!” She called out, finally letting go as he went out the door.

It was a trust he didn’t want to betray.

The next day, when he returned she seemed ready to forget what had happened, or so he had thought. She made no advances and kept the topics of conversation relatively safe.

Relatively.

Hiding for so long had left her restless, she explained she felt trapped, staying in the apartment while he brought her everything she needed.

Of course she understood that it was too dangerous for her to go anywhere, but maybe he could find someplace where it would be safe for her to go for a walk. The apartment was in an abandoned part of the city after all, so it wasn’t like anyone would see her and he himself had reassured her that there were no infected in the area.

In his opinion there was no place safe enough, if he lost her he had no clue what he would do and it was far too easy to imagine some harm befalling her. Keeping her safe from him was a hard enough task.

When he tried to leave she demanded that he stay, insisting that it wasn’t fair for him to go out while she was trapped inside.

So he stayed for the night.

The next morning she had him look over some of the files she’d found, apparently having managed to hack into some database that belonged either to Gentech or Blackwatch. It was hard to tell because the projects all seemed long defunct. There may have been something in them though, some name, some hint of a place, something useful, so he looked over them with her.

Mention of the mysterious PARIAH in several of the documents caught his attention, hinting at possible leads, a new project for Dana to pursue.

He’d hoped that it would serve as a distraction, but instead she made him tell her everything he knew about PARIAH, pulling the whole jumble of information and disjointed memories out of him piece by piece with careful questioning. There wasn’t much, but she pressed for more and more, learning the story of Hope Idaho.

Actual information on the events that had conspired there was hard to come by so most of what he told her was new to her.

Until she commented on it he hadn’t realized how so much of what he thought he knew was contradictory, dates and events mutually exclusive, stories people had been told combined with rampant speculation where people had filled in the gaps of their knowledge with guesswork.

He’d taken it all at face value for the men and women he’d consumed had, but Dana pointed out the holes in it, even noticing where he’d done speculating of his own.

It was interesting to have a different perspective on things.

They talked all day, the conversation going from government conspiracies and cover-ups to more mundane things. Somehow they ended up on the subject of some of the articles Dana had written for various websites.

She found a few, had him read them and he pretended to be interested, because after what they’d both been through reading about corrupt politicians, government funded research and companies dumping pollutants into waterways honestly wasn’t very impressive.

Especially when some of what she’d written had about as many holes in its logic as his account of the Hope experiments.

She laughed, dismissed it as commission work, explaining that as long as she wrote what people wanted to read she got paid and people liked reading what lined up with what they believed.

“What do you want to believe?” She asked him as she prepared dinner for the two of them, even though she knew he wouldn’t eat.

It was a fascinating question, something he’d never considered. He’d spent the first weeks of what amounted to his life chasing a lie, that he’d been wronged, the victim of some vast shadowy conspiracy, that Alex Mercer had been an innocent man. Finding that there had been a conspiracy, but he’d been a part of it and what had happened to him had all been his fault had been a horrific shock. Except it wasn’t all his fault, at least not at the start because he wasn’t really Alex Mercer, Mercer was just the first of the Blacklight virus’ countless victims.

Dana was looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something.

“That I’m not…” he paused, trying to figure out of all the many things he was what it was that he wanted to believe he wasn’t, “The man who abandoned you and then dragged you into this whole mess.”

She gave him a small, knowing smile.

He was doomed.

Again he spent the night because Dana wouldn’t let him do otherwise.

She refused to go to bed, claiming that she was nervous to be alone, that she’d heard something outside the window and was afraid that she’d have nightmares and then wakeup alone.

She was lying, but he couldn’t argue, not when she looked at him that way.

He’d said he didn’t want to be the one to abandon her and his own words held him trapped.

As was the routine he sat on the couch because he didn’t need to sleep.

Dana sat next to him, not trying anything more than she already was.

Fully clothed, wrapped in a blanket, holding a cup of tea she was still trying, just in a different way.

She assumed that he was enough like her that he would eventually get hungry and try to leave. Then she’d have an argument to make, some way of twisting the situation so that he would give her what she wanted. What he couldn’t explain was that he would if it were possible, if he were human enough for it to be safe.

Sitting on the couch he tried to ignore her, something she made sure was impossible.

Dana stretched out, resting her feet on his lap as he sat, “You know I’m not afraid of you.”

He’d never wanted her to be afraid of him, though she probably should have been. There had been times he’d frightened her though and he considered mentioning that.

“So what are you afraid of?” She moved her foot back and forth on his thigh.

He answered without hesitation, “Hurting you.”

Dana sighed and abruptly stood up, walking straight to the door, “It’s the virus, isn’t it? You think you don’t have control, that you’ll get carried away and hurt me.”

She was at least partially right and for that and so much more deserved an explanation.

“I’m not human,” he smiled wryly, “I just pretend.”

“Don’t say that about yourself,” she huffed, always quick to defend him, right or wrong, even when what was being said was the truth.

He had an idea of what it was that she wanted to believe, that he was as human as he tried to act, but she’d never seen firsthand what he was capable of.

She tensed when he began to shift his form, tendrils rising up, twisting and flowing over his skin, hardening into spines and black armor that slowly crept over his form until he was completely covered.

“Touché,” she smirked, then opened the door.

“What are you doing?” Alex stood up. If he needed to he could cover the distance between them in a single leap, but there was the risk of hurting Dana. Talking her out of whatever idea she’d gotten into her head would be safer. If he could talk her out of it. The past weeks had proven that she could be remarkably stubborn about some things.

“I’m going out for a walk,” with surprising speed she opened the door just enough to slip outside and slammed it shut behind her.

Alex was at the door in a flash. Opening it normally was a struggle when tearing it off its hinges would have been just as easy and so much more satisfying, but then they’d have to find a new place for her to hide because she’d refuse to live in a place without a door.

Halfway down the hall she smiled at him.

Then she took off running.

Still in his inhuman, armored form he ran after her, closing the distance between them in seconds despite her head start.

He wanted to tell her to stop, that she was being childish, immature, that what she was doing was dangerous, but even if he wasn’t some mindless infected he still had many of the same instincts as they did and those instincts took over.

Danna was running from him.

Prey ran.

Tendrils rose from his arms and chest, reaching out, wrapping around her and pulling her close to him.

Like she had wanted.

Restraint was a desperate struggle. Her skin was so soft, so delicate, the slightest shift in his hold on her and those tendrils would constrict, crushing the life from her.

He pulled her against him, wrapped an arm around her and held her against him, waiting for the desire to grow claws, to tear her open and feel her blood on them to pass. It would, he knew it.

The other desires though, inhuman as they were, wouldn’t.

She was prey, but she was also a potential host for Blacklight. He could let his tendrils dig in, not deep enough to kill her, but draw blood and…

He shook his head, willing the thought to pass. It was too dangerous, too horrible to think about.

Thinking it would help, he looked down at Dana, hoping to see fear and be reminded of why he had to be careful.

Why he had to resist.

She looked back up at him.

It was hard to be sure of her expression because in his armored form he lacked proper eyes, just photosensitive patches and primitive structures that were sensitive to heat and movement, across the smooth plane of twisted bone and hardened flesh that should have been his face, but he thought that she might be smiling up at him, oblivious of the danger she was in.

“We both want this,” she said softly, shifting in his grip to try and rub against him. His armor made it impossible to feel much more than the movement, and maybe the slightest sense of one of her hands brushing against him, searching.

She still thought it was a game.

One of his tendrils, barely more sensitive than the rest of him, which made sense considering their purpose, brushed against her neck, coiling and twisting.

There were some things they could feel, the heat of her body, her pulse racing just beneath her skin. It was to help with catching and killing prey.

Which Dana wasn’t, could never be.

“Are these…” Dana stopped her futile efforts to take one of his tendrils in her hand, careful back and forth movements, suggestive, but so far removed from what he wanted, “Can you feel this? I mean you can control them obviously, but…”

He could feel it and it only made things worse.

The tendril wrapped around her hand too tightly.

Her gasp of surprise rose to one of pain.

“Alex,” she cautioned, unaware that he knew.

He could feel the small bones of her fingers, understood exactly how easily they would break.

And if they broke it wouldn’t be like with him where shattered bone and torn flesh mended with a thought, injuries gone as though they’d never happened.

Did it have to be that way though? The two of them so different?

He knew it was the virus that made him wonder things like that, like how whenever she touched him there would be a moment where he considered grabbing her and digging his claws into her, biting her, something to draw blood and expose her to him, to the virus.

Maybe what the two of them wanted wasn’t all that different.

The underlying instincts were the same even in the mechanics weren’t.

Tendrils had slid under her shirt tearing at the fabric to help stave off the urge to do more.

Even if he couldn’t feel much with those tendrils there were the faintest inklings of taste.

The salt of her sweat, the bitter traces of fear, and something more that he’d never encountered before.

Her body so warm, so vulnerable.

It was the vulnerability that excited him the most.

When she struggled, if she struggled, it would be pointless.

Unlike the hunters, the walkers, there was nothing she could do to harm him, no claws, no fangs.

Easy prey.

Tendrils glided across her stomach, beneath the waist of her pants.

A new taste, a new feeling.

He had the memories of enough men and women to know what it meant.

The armor on his face shifted and slid until he had some semblance of a mouth, “You want this.”

Dana nodded.

He let go of her so that only the tendrils were holding her.

More armor shifted, things changed further, photosensitive patches refining into eyes so that he could look at her.

Now her eyes were wide, the taste of fear stronger.

“That’s…” she trailed off, shook her head and tried again, “Okay, that’s creepy…”

So used to the way his body shifted according to his will, he never considered that things wouldn’t always line up perfectly. What he used to sense the world around him in his armored form wouldn’t line up with human eyes in shape or placement. Certainly not in number.

But she didn’t try to pull away even as his tendrils grew more focused with their explorations.

The ones across her chest tightened, making her gasp with something other than pain as they circled her breasts.

Lower down, the one tasting the wetness of her slit was joined by others, sliding back and forth, but not entering.

That would be too dangerous until he was sure he could control himself, find some way to do things without hurting her, or at least without hurting her too badly. The risk would be there no matter how careful he was.

Stolen memories meant that he knew just what to do to pass the time until he gained confidence.

The tendrils at her breasts rolled back and forth over her nipples, occasionally stopping to coil and squeeze until she whimpered or gasped. Then he would relent, just for a moment while the tendrils between her legs repositioned themselves, pressing up harder, sliding back and forth, seeking, not that finding her clit was any real effort. The challenge was finding the way to move so that she let out a whimper and pressed harder against him, sliding back and forth along with the movements of his tendrils.

The effort gave him something to focus on other than tightening his grip on her until she cried out in pain. Then he’d dig his claws, his tendrils into her and do what he really wanted to.

Except he couldn’t let that happen, not to Dana.

His claws were ready, he’d felt his hands shift reflexively, and he used them to cut away the remaining tatters of her clothing, further exposing her to him.

Once or twice he grazed her skin, by accident. Not enough to break it and draw blood, but enough to leave little raised red lines.

He smiled at that, moved his tendrils so he could trace his claws over her breasts, carefully take her nipple between two of them, watching her eyes grow wide again as she nervously watched him, before going back to softly scraping at her skin, watching those little lines raise up. It was fascinating to see.

There was some explanation to that, one that tried to rise up in his mind, the memories of some scientist or another trying to intrude on the moment. He didn’t follow them as he normally would, instead drawing on other memories, ones that would better suit his purpose.

He leaned in and kissed the side of her neck.

Dana turned away as teeth and armor grazed the skin there.

She didn’t like it, but that was fine.

Everything else he did seemed to be enjoyable enough for her.

The way she gasped and tensed when, by accident of her shifting in his grip the tip of a tendril that had been intended to press against her clit and twist slipped inside her, made him smile despite himself.

And when the tendril surged in deeper, doubling back on itself and probing to see what it could find she leaned forward until he was half holding her up with his tendrils.

“There,” she hissed through clenched teeth, “That’s the spot.”

He obliged, the tendril coiling in a knot against itself to press harder at the place he’d found.

That he’d managed to go so long without hurting her or taking things too far was amazing and he wondered how much longer it would last. Would he be able to get her to finish before it became too much for him and he did what he wanted to, what he really wanted to?

In the grip of his tendrils Dana rocked and moaned, leaning more and more weight against them until he was supporting her with them. He considered trying to lift her with them, hold her suspended in front of him, but decided against it.

From there it would be too tempting to pull her in, crushing her against him and give into the instincts he was fighting.

Dana was too important, her pleasure all that mattered at this moment.

And the challenge of resisting.

Another flash of memory, the suggestion that the best things were made better by needing to work for them.

The look on Dana’s face, concentration and something else, the taste of her skin, her racing pulse made him inclined to agree.

More tendrils slid between her legs, sliding back and forth, in and out in constant motion, pressing against her clit, twisting and rubbing. Her hands were there as well, guiding and holding and he lost himself in the sense of touch and taste, pressing harder and harder, rubbing as she cried out in pleasure that bordered on pain.

There were subtle differences, her heartrate speeding up, muscles tensing and relaxing, the sense of something building. The sour taste of fear was gone, replaced by something heady and intoxicating.

Something that made it harder and harder to fight what he wanted to do.

She whimpered, relaxed in his grasp for the span of three heartbeats, which he knew because he was counting, then the tension returned. In her stomach, between her legs, down her spine, muscles convulsed and relaxed as she thrashed in his grip, crying out. Tendrils tightened, possibly to the point where it might have been painful for her, but she was too lost in the moment to notice, endorphins flooding her body as orgasm neared and then washed over her.

He lost track of time, counting heartbeats as they sped up with her climax and then slowed back down as she relaxed, limp in his tendrils.

Carefully moving the ones inside her made her twitch and whimper, which was amusing, and he got her to arc her back again when he had the ones around her chest squeeze.

“Careful,” she winced and tried to push them away when the tendrils continued to rub at her clit.

He nodded, lowering her to the ground, the tendrils retracting as his armor faded away.

Dana lay on the floor, smiling up at him, “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

He shrugged. She was right in that he hadn’t hurt her, but that was the most he was willing to give it, even if what they’d done had been fun.

“Next time we can do what you’d like,” she offered, sitting up and leaning against the wall.

He sat down across from her, trying not to ruin the moment by showing concern, “Maybe.”

It was difficult for him to tell, focused as he had been on not hurting her, but there had been a moment where he might have nicked her with his claws or done something with the tendrils inside her, because there had been a moment where he had thought he had scented or even tasted blood. He’d dismissed it as his imagination at the time, a projection of what he wanted rather than reality, but he couldn’t be sure. Of course, even if he was right and it was his imagination there were likely traces of viral particles lingering on her, inside her, waiting to infect and spread.

Over the next few days he’d have to keep a careful eye on her.

One way or another she’d probably be fine and then they could see if her wants and desires were still the same.

If they were and his remained unchanged as the infection progressed then maybe he would take her up on the offer of doing what he wanted.

Odds were good that if she were infected she’d be able to put up enough of a fight and survive it.


End file.
